Think the Opposite when Picking Travel Related&nbspKeywords

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Picking keywords is one of the most important parts of SEO. You want the best keywords with the highest value so you can make the most money. People spend hours looking through analytics tools for the juiciest keywords. This is especially true in travel. After pornography, travel is the second thing people spend money on on the Internet. They buy expensive plane tickets, cruises, hotels, vacation packages, and travel insurance. Everyone wants a peice of that pie and there is good reason why companies spend millions on their SEO efforts for these keywords

Everyone goes after these "good" keywords but you shouldn’t. We are all “taught” to go after these high value, high paying keywords, such as cheap flights, travel insurance, cruises, vacations, tropical vacations, and the like. Afterall, we want to make lots of money and these keywords are worth a lot in clicks and revenue. While hidden, high value keywords exist in other fields, they don’t usually exist in travel so we end up competing with lots of people for the same keywords. Large travel companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars going after keywords that pay off right away. They dominate the field and with Google’s preference to brands, you just won’t get anywhere in the search results unless you are lucky or have lots of money to devote.

A perfect example of my theory can be seen when you search for the keyword “cheap flights:"

Do any small fish pop up in your results? Nope. They are all big companies and established brands. That is never going to change. A single person with limited time and money just can't compete. That doesn’t mean, however, that there isn’t money to be made in travel. In fact, I think what people deem as “bad keywords” are really the best ones in travel. Bad keywords are keywords people use to search for information such as “backpacking europe” or “things to do in Iceland." These may not be money keywords in the sense people use them to buy a product right away but keywords like this are good for two reasons:

Time vs. Effort

If you do decide to go after “good” keywords, you are going to be competing with large companies with large budgets and established brands. It’s going to take a long, long time and will probably cost you a lot of money to rank as high as them. Trying to rank for phrases like “backpacking Europe” or “tropical islands” or “Seychelles tropical vacations” will take much less time and a lot less effort. Big companies don't go after these keywords because they don't lead to sales right away. This gives you an edge because you face less competition and thus can rank higher in the search results. Moreover, those keywords get a lot of traffic. Backpacking Europe gets over 33,000 searches per month. Tropical island gets 368,000 and things to do in Iceland gets 2,900. (Based on the Google Adwords Keyword tool.)

All in all, for less work, you can rank higher and get more traffic than you can with those "good" keywords. These other keywords are much easier to break into as most don’t have huge SEO budgets (or any) to really compete with someone heavily doing SEO. Simply put, you get more bang for your buck.

But isn’t it all about the money? It is, and we can turn all that seemingly worthless traffic into money. That is where my second point comes in.

Higher Pageviews and Conversion

People who end up searching for these keywords want information and when they find the right site, they stay there gobbling it up. They look at more pages and stay on your site longer. For example, people who come to my website and look for Australia travel tips tend to look at 3.4 pages per visit. Those that come for Europe travel information end up reading 4.6 pages per visit. (Google Analytics numbers.) They stick around and read my site.

The higher page view and lower bounce rate gives me more chances to turn visitors into subscribers, readers, or buyers. Instead of reading and leaving, I now have more times to win them over. For example, if someone searches for the keyword “backpacking Southeast Asia,” they are probably not looking to buy something, they are looking for information for their trip. They are doing research. These people come to your site and they look at pages upon pages. They research and read and keep on going. Five pages in, they might find a compelling argument for a product they need, such as travel insurance. In all probability, they will most likely purchase it from you. You've become an expert in their mind, they see you have good information, and you page a compelling case for the product. In the end, you’ve still made a sale, but you didn’t have to do all the work of trying to rank for “travel insurance.” Additionally, they may sign up for your newsletter, bookmark your site, or subscribe to your RSS. You have taken a Google visitor and turned him into a long term reader. I get many emails from people who find my site via Google, tell me what a great reference it is, and say how they will be reading more. Lifetime readers are more likely to come back over and over again, giving you many chances to deliver a product to them and make a sale.

How to Pick Travel Keywords

One of the hardest parts of SEO is picking keywords. If we are going to rule out the obvious keywords like cheap flights, what should we pick? For one, we can look at the Google Keyword Tool and type in “Europe” and get a list that goes on for miles. We can then wade through that list and and spend hours looking for good and bad keywords. On the other hand, we can think like a vacationer. It may not always need to be an exotic local but we all take a vacation somewhere at some point. The easiest way to pick good travel keywords that can generate pageviews and keep visitors on your site is to think about what you search for when you travel! This is an important part of SEO. If you can understand what people are searching for, you’ll be able to comeup with some excellent keywords for your site. Think about it. If you are going to New York City, what would you type in? Off the top of my head, I would think of these terms:

Visiting New York City

New York City Travel

New York City Tips

Things to do in New York City

Things to see in NYC

What is there to do in NYC

None of these are “buy keywords” but they are a lot easier to rank for because of less competition. I like informational keywords because they keep people on my sites longer. I can easily upsell a product with informational keywords than spending my time trying to rank for keywords like “flights to New York City.”

At the end of the day, the only time people consume travel information is when they are going on a trip. We read SEOmoz everyday to stay informed just like people read Techcrunch or the Huffington Post, but how many of us read the Lonely Planet website when we aren’t planning a trip? Not many. If someone is consistently reading a travel blog or website, it is because they are trying to follow the personality or, like me, they are just travel obessesed. However, this is not true for the majority of people. So SEO becomes more important because we only have a small window in which to work with. We may be getting visitors who visit our sites on low value keywords, but we can then funnel them towards a high value keyword that makes us money!

About NomadicMatt36 —
Matthew Kepnes has been traveling around the world for the past four years. He runs the award winning budget travel site, Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site (http://www.nomadicmatt.com) and has been featured in The New York Times and Yahoo! Finance. He currently writes for AOL Travel and The Huffington Post. You can also follow me on twitter: @nomadicmatt

When I was working on travel blog, I went to select travel keywords, I always confused why we should choose so competitive keywords?. Though they have good search volume, there are less chances for lead conversion. Honestly, this has happened with me. I did well job to bring high completive keywords in top # in SERP. But compare to it informative keywords like "Facts about Eiffel tower" gave me tons of visitors.

There is need to think logically while selecting keywords, asking friends what they would type when they want to travel is best idea to develop lead conversioning keywords.

This is a super article which will help every SEO practioners and website owners.

I can speak from experience on this matter. We currently work with a small boat cruise company in Alaska, with two boats and very specific demographics to target. Rather then focusing on broader terms, we have found great success going after more specific, more aplicable terms. Not only to they get to see ranking results quickly, but they get better quality traffic from those terms, as that is exactly what they were looking for.

Great posting! I can identify with a great deal of what you have written.

A googd post Matt. I'm in the same industry in we the big boys are killings us in terms of budget in PPC and in Organic. I agree that we should traget those "non buy now" keywords and target those people just trying to get info and eventually subscribe to your newsletter or website if you engage them.

Thanks for this post. I work in a travel industry niche (we are an adventure tour operator)...there aren't many 'big boys' in our niche, but it's fairly obvious that the bigger players don't put much time into long-tail SEO. They usually just try to dominate for a few top-level keywords that will drive the most traffic. On the other hand, our site is set up to target a few top-level terms with our top-level pages, then we work down to destinations, activities, regions, and finally to the actual trip pages. The secondary landing pages which target lower-level search terms are definitely less competitive and drive the most traffic for us.

You are 100 % on the money with this post. Im a bit of a different SEO bird, I am from the other side of the fence, I am a director of Marketing in a US Tourism destination, Pigeon Forge Tennessee. I got fed up with “Well it’s real complicated and you need to purchase PPC to get found advice from my Web designers, & local agency reps. I began studying SEO 3 years ago and have found exactly what you are talking about in this article, to be the cornerstone of my best practices online marketing model. Any tourism related business who understands their customer can search for the best Keywords in several areas –Long- tail keyword strategy is producing profound results in tourism related business- online sales. As a business manager my # 1 goal is ROI, business owners have little patience for experimentation, in today’s economy you need to produce and be able to prove it to last out here. "Plan the Work- then Work the plan" formulate a baseline metric as a starting point utilize your analytics and make sure if you do not have an OMA, you had better make sure that you offer discounts and coupons, track everything. A rich Keyword strategy - combine with concise content strategy are essential in this environment. Being on top in search ranking is great, but does it make the Cash register ring at the end of the day... is the real question.

Nice info, but from my experience simple switching from money words to information words is not enough. You still have to research, you still have to compete, you still have to build reputation. I get your point and it is good one, but unfortunatelly only part of the job. I have a site with great content which was just sitting there and nobody visited it because I believed content is king. Without proper linking and constant SEO king is dead...

Great advice. With a general travel blog, it's extremely difficult to rank highly for the top keywords in a post. Most posts are on a different topic (e.g., waterfalls in Costa Rica, Restaurants in Playa del Carmen), so you don't have the advantage of being able to repeately build authority and rank with the same keywords.

We've managed to do very well with long tail keywords on our travel site. Admittedly, we're only bringing in a few folks a day with most posts/keywords, but they add up. If we'd tried to rank for the top keywords, I'm sure we'd be buried on page 20 of the SERPs results. Google suicide.

Great article - thank you for shedding some light on this topic! I have also been traveling around the world for the last four years, and finally started to share that amazing experience on my blog. I have loads of unfinished articles and unedited videos that I hope will inspire many people once I have them ready! To satiate my wanderlust while in the states visiting family, I decided to invest in a 19 foot Class B RV and have spent the last 3 months customizing it. The experience came with a lot of lessons and I want to share them for anyone thinking about pursing the backpacking, van dwelling, nomadic lifestyle as we do ;) So again, thank you for sharing your knowledge about SEO and what it takes to get your insights noticed! All the best, all the time :D

I have been working with a client for the last few years targeting locale specific long tail phrases not necessarily targeted to "buy now" customers. Initially these consumers accounted for approximately 83% of all organic traffic to the site, however, over the last year this has changed dramatically and has dropped to just over 17%. The major difference has been a substantial increase in brand related searches, now accounting for 61% off all organic traffic - end of year analysis revealed that a lot of consumers who initially found the site via longtail are now repeat visitors via brand related search terms.

I think it's your first post on seomoz & you really hit nail on the head. Choosing keywords for your site is one of the crucial & important task for seo people. The whole seo game lies in those particular keywords only. You are right that we should choose keywords based on the interest of the users & not for only ranking purpose.

A good post NomadicMatt. I'm in the same industry and the big boys are killings us in terms of budget in PPC and in Organic results for those buy keywords. I agree that we should target those "non buy now" keywords and target those people just trying to get info and eventually subscribe to your newsletter or website if you engage them.

This is a great post, this is soo true people always seem to think oh I will target the big boys first.

But really you need to spend soo much time researching the juicy fruit which will be more effective to rank for, after you do your advanced keyword research then you put your keywords though market comparison tools then you filter them down even more you still need to do more research ;)

Then comes in the link building/ on site SEO and other factors it is a never ending game.

When I checked tropical islands in Googles keyword tool and looked at exact match types the local monthly searches is 880. This to me is the figure I would rather quote to my client, mainly because it is the worst case scenario and also you are managing your clients expectations better which also gives you room to over achieve when your clients google page views start to rise. I have just done an interior design company's SEO and they are page 1 on Interior Design, Interior Desgner and Interior Designers. 2, 240,000 global monthly searches show up for broad match types on Interior Designers, however as of today only 4,400 show up for exact match types. I know for a fact that on average my client is getting 100 hirts a day now on average which equates to 3,000 local month searches. If I had quoted the 2,240,000 figure to my client from the onset then I would be having a lot to explain why they are not getting 72,000 hits a day. I suggest that people only quote the exact match type figure based on local monthly searches to avoid future problems.